dehyphenated
Oct. 18th, 2010 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn a massive display of wasting space on the Internet, Slate has published a grammar nazi's rant about punctuation in Woody Allen film titles.
As it is no longer possible to comment on Slate without giving up your first-born privacy, I will place my note here, and that is a response to Mr Heller's complaint that Small Time Crooks is "not, in fact, a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time, although [I] might have found that premise more rewarding."
I just would have liked to have informed him that there already had been a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time. It was called Time Bandits and it was directed by Terry Gilliam. It's a pretty good film; he might like it. What I do not know is whether the fact that he was making, in truth, a film about small time crooks had occurred to Mr Gilliam. Knowing his work, I wouldn't put it past him to have buried in his movie a pun that wasn't discovered for thirty years.
At least this reading of Woody Allen's title is at least as amusing as the confusion, noted by amused commentators at the time the movie came out, over whether Eight Legged Freaks was about freaks with eight legs, or about eight freaks with legs.
As it is no longer possible to comment on Slate without giving up your first-born privacy, I will place my note here, and that is a response to Mr Heller's complaint that Small Time Crooks is "not, in fact, a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time, although [I] might have found that premise more rewarding."
I just would have liked to have informed him that there already had been a film about dwarf ne'er-do-wells who steal time. It was called Time Bandits and it was directed by Terry Gilliam. It's a pretty good film; he might like it. What I do not know is whether the fact that he was making, in truth, a film about small time crooks had occurred to Mr Gilliam. Knowing his work, I wouldn't put it past him to have buried in his movie a pun that wasn't discovered for thirty years.
At least this reading of Woody Allen's title is at least as amusing as the confusion, noted by amused commentators at the time the movie came out, over whether Eight Legged Freaks was about freaks with eight legs, or about eight freaks with legs.
